ARRENDAMIENTO Y PROPIEDAD: POULANTZAS Y LENIN

The world-creative era in Aboriginal mythology is known in English as the

Dreamtime. There is a case to be made for avoiding use of the term 'mythology' in accounts of Aboriginal culture, and hence avoiding a myth-reality opposition which has no place in an Aboriginal worldview in which religious knowledge and historical knowledge are not mutually exclusive categories. Many Aborigines and some

anthropologists refer to 'myths' as stories, often in the sense that each sacred place in the landscape has its own story. One advantage of 'story' over 'myth' is that it emphasizes the active role of the individual in framing narratives and interpreting stories. Recent discussions of the problem of rendering Aboriginal ontology and cosmology into English include Rose (1992: 34-47) and Williams (1986: 25-34, 234- 37).

The Dreaming is an epoch in which supernatural spirit-beings in human and animal form emerged or awakened and travelled the world, creating its various features. The era ended with their going back into the earth where they remain, sleeping but fully powerful. Dream ing constitute a history of the world. It also acts as a personal history in that each individual receives a particle of an ancestral spirit-being local to the place they were conceived. They have a relationship with this spirit-being, are able to communicate ritually with it and other ancestoral spirit-beings, and will themselves, upon death, go back into the land and into the Dreaming. The Dreaming thus

continues. It has a beginning but no end. Dreaming stories are narratives in that each is 'an intricate patterning of the activities of mythic beings' (Bemdt 1974: 13).

Aboriginal religion is 'essentially land-minded and land-centred' (Bemdt 1982: 2). As the ancestoral spirit-beings created not only dominant landscape features such as mountains and rivers but also individual trees, rocks, and water holes, the landscape in its entirety is understood to have been created and imprinted by them. In their

travels the Dreamtime beings moved along specific pathways known to the living and commemorated by them. The pathways are dotted with landscape features created in the course of their travels and adventures. People travel the same tracks - in the arid zone they form a web linking key water holes - and visit the Dreaming sites, these being the sacred sites, ownership of which forms the basis of recent lands claims.

Such, in fairly crude summary, is Aboriginal Dreamtime 'mythology' as recorded in northern Australia by anthropologists in the first half of the century. The Dreaming has also been a key component of the construction of 'traditional' Aboriginality and has long been held by white Australians to have been one of the casualties of the encounter between Aboriginal and white culture in the southeast. Before asking if the Dreaming survives in southeastern Aboriginal cultures I will briefly scan some of the newer studies of mythology where the emphasis is on social process.

Dreaming stories have been described as 'blueprints' or guides' for human action and welfare (Berndt 1974). This is a functionalist interpretation which holds the Dreaming to be a charter for human action. The Dreaming 'mythology', in this sense, is a given. Against this view, or modifying it, is the understanding of Dreaming stories as dynamic and able to be personalized by the living. Among the Walbiri of Central Australia the manner in which the ancestors transform themselves into country (at particular sites) and into ritual objects (e.g., tjurunga boards) is 'conceived as a process linking the interior subjectivity of the person with the external world' (Munn quoted in Morton 1987: 102). This means of objectification personalizes the

landscape, but it does so for the living as well as the ancestral beings. Links are established (e.g., via conception sites) between living individuals and particular ancestral beings. Upon death the individual (in spirit) goes into the ground at the site of the ancestor with which he is linked. The object world is thus a 'common currency' shared by the living, the generations of the dead, and the ancestors. Dreaming stories and ritual are 'a form or mode of experiencing the world in which symbols of

collectivity [the landscape and ritual objects] are constantly recharged with intimations of the self (Munn quoted in Morton 1987: 105). If the Dreaming is a charter it is thus clearly not one which is passively received. It appears to allow individuals to put their own imprint on the country and to integrate themselves with the past.

Nor, it seems, does landscape precede the Dreaming in the sense of landscape features demanding the sort of explanation Dreaming stories provide as a topographic charter. Kolig maintains that 'myth' is 'arbitrarily superimposed on a geographic site and embellished over the years' (1980: 121). As awareness of a particular story

spreads to more people it may be elaborated by individual contributions as it moves across space (a story may also be handed from one tribe to another) and down through time.

The dialectical nature of the relationship between living people and the Dreaming comes out also in the way they must reproduce the stories such as to maintain its congruity with present reality of their lives. Since the world is constantly changing, the Dreaming, too, must constantly change. There is now a body of anthropological research which details such change, focussing particularly on the way the Dreaming of tribal groups has responded to contact with the West. Hugh-Jones (1989), for

instance, shows how white people have been assimilated into the mythology of Indians in the Colombian northwest Amazon. He employs the concept of 'analogy­ matching' to show one way in which this is done, giving an example of how

information he had provided of the previously unheard of submarine was woven into an account of the mythic anaconda. It is not so much a matter of myth changing as of myth accommodating a new twist in a world full of novelty: 'It is as if submarines had been there all along, lurking under the surface of the myth and waiting to be

discovered by some chance remark' (1989: 64-65). Similarly, Kolig (1980) cites the case of a natural landscape feature in the Fitzroy River area of Western Australia which, according to the relevant story in the area, is the resting place of Noah's Ark, a tenet of Christian mythology thus successfully synthesized with the Dreaming.

In the world of Hugh-Jones' subjects, remote in the Amazon, white men remain for the most part on the periphery. In other parts of South America the encounter with Europe was traumatic and entailed extensive and rapid social, economic, and political change. The Spanish 'installed' marian and other images from the Christian

iconography as patrons of villages and towns in the Andes in the expectation that reverence would be transferred to them from pagan deities (Sallnow 1987,1991; Urton

1990). From the end of the sixteenth century particular images became famous for the miracles they performed and their shrines became the foci of pilgrimage. The location of these shrines, as it turns out, tended to coincide with pre-Conquest mythological sites and continuities are apparent between the specific belief and ritual surrounding these shrines and indigenous mythology. A similar scenario appears to have

accompanied the Christianization of Europe (Chapter 1) and also the early Buddhist 'colonization' of the indigenous animistic landscape of Thailand (Chapter 6). Sallnow stresses that the Christian shrines did not 'emerge onto religious tabulae rasae but into

a historically prefigured ritual topography, a preexisting pattem of sacred sites from which they must draw their significance' (1987: 89, emphasis added).

The category, sacred space, does indeed seem to embody a sedimentation of memory in which locality is more enduring than meaning. Once subjects, be they ancestral spirit-beings or generations of the dead, have been 'objectified', to use Munn's parlance, into points in the landscape, these points are liable to persist through time and accommodate to a great deal of social change. Even through epochs of the greatest social change people seem more disposed to reinterpret the points than discard them. Where the points are marked by old religious structures or emblems they may appear actually to attract reinterpretation. A permutation of this occurs where secular remains - the ruins of a town, a crumbling ancient wall, or an archaeological deposit - are recontextualized later in time as sacred.

In what Urton (1990) calls 'concretization' we have the mirror image of such processes. He reveals how, for administrative and bureaucratic purposes, the Spanish in the Andes appropriated pre-Conquest mythology by linking it to specific points in space and to particular lineages of the indigenous elite. It was in this way that the origin place of the Inka ancestors, which in the original mythology was not identified with an exact locality, after 1572 became associated with a village, Pacariqtambo, which had not existed until the previous year.

The foregoing stresses the dynamic nature of myth. In Australia the conception of the Dreaming as charter has, to some extent, appeared in new guise in the land claim

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context, becoming a charter for ownership over land and responsibility^ (see Sutton 1988: 252). Sutton points out that because of the narrative form of

creation/transformation stories, 'mythology', in this sense, is also history. But his interest is in showing that it is a history constructed rather than simply received by the living. To this end he cites cases where certain Dreaming paths seem to represent the residential movements and ceremonial histories of the key men to whom these Dreamings belong. In some areas migrations of people may become embodied in Dreaming stories and people may actually move their Dreaming from one place to another (see the Finniss River land claim, above). Similarly, the Bemdts (1970) show how the Gunwinggu's move to Oenpelli early this century involved an associated migration of Dreamtime beings to that place. Sutton sees Aboriginal 'mythology' as an 'idiom' (1988: 254) rather than a charter, a code by which peoples' residence,

ownership, and totemic rights and linkages are debated and negotiated. So, rather than its being a charter for the present from the past he seems to see it more the other way round, as reflecting actual historical events experienced by living people or their recent forebears.

Myers (1986) helps us appreciate the peculiar way in which the Dreamtime departs from the Western understanding of myth and history. The Dreamtime as understood at any one time is not contradicted by novel events or the arrival of totally unprecedented elements, such as Europeans and European settlements, into the landscape. These are not so much incorporated into the Dreamtime as revealed, through visions, to be a previously unrealized dimension of it.

In Western historical terms, changes have always taken place. The evidence of new customs and new cults is unassailable; life is not static. The Pintupi understandings of the historical process are not totally static either, but the concept of the The Dreaming organizes experience so that it appears to be continuous and permanent. For the Pintupi, the dynamic, processual aspect of history seems to exist as one of discovering, uncovering, or even reenacting elements of The Dreaming.

Myers 1986: 53

In the Andes, Urton tells us, there are no institutions or practices untouched by history; there are no 'innocent survivors' (1990: 15). Equally, it must be clear that there is no Aboriginal Dreaming anywhere in Australia untouched and unchanged by the events of the last century or two. And yet against all indications that the Dreaming is dynamic and negotiated is the entrenched view of many white Australians that the Dreaming has been lost to Aborigines of the southeast. That it has fallen victim to change. This is compatible with the conception of Aboriginal culture as static and unchanging. Those who hold to this view would expect to find in the southeast, at most, only remnants of recognizably 'traditional' stories . They would not expect to find a Dreaming which has re-formed. A suggestion of what might result from such a re-formation is given by Sansom, referring to Baines' work among the Nyungar people of the southwest of Western Australia. Here a body of legend has emerged in which Dreaming beings are replaced by known human ancestors and the stories record the adventures o f these ancestors on their travels along known routes through the present country o f their descendants (Sansom 1982: 121). The 'new cosmology' (1982: 120) o f such people is an adaptive reworking of the structure of the 'traditional' Dreaming.

The European habit of drawing a distinction between 'real' history and mythology or legend on the basis of the former's presumed factual veracity goes back to the seventeenth century. Scholars at that time were attempting to deal with the

contradiction which claims of great antiquity for the Egyptian and Chinese civilizations posed to biblical chronology. They claimed it was possible to distinguish between the

'real' history o f the Bible, an account they believed to be based on fact, and 'fabulous' history based on myth and legend (Rossi 1984: 158-67). This was not simply a distinction based on the superiority of the written over the oral record since, at least in the case of China, written records existed for the ancient dynasties and posed a problem to the extent that they predated biblical time. Rather, it was a case of discriminating on the basis of the supposed character of the authors of the written records. The Egyptians and the Chinese were held to be 'rough and primitive nations' who were inclined to fantasize their history (Rossi 1984: 159). In the European mind from at least this time the classification of different modes of representing time was linked to the classification of different human societies. Historical accuracy became, in this way, a monopoly of European society. Other civilizations, to say nothing of non­ literate societies, could not be trusted to accurately record their own past. Clearly there were many other factors involved in the formulation of this distinction but it is one which has held firm up until the present. Only now is it being shaken loose by deconstructionist insights. The mythical/rational should be seen as a sub-set of the premodem/modem and non-West/West binary oppositions. Such is its immanent power that the West is unlikely, even now, to part with it easily.